Craford presented a review paper on the latest LED advances last Tuesday during a meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver, Colorado.

A switch to LEDs in place of conventional lighting would save "a huge amount of electricity and a huge amount of money," he told National Geographic News.

The energy savings "will amount to well over a hundred nuclear power plants worldwide."

Materials scientist Steve DenBaars directs a research center at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), that focuses on energy-efficient lighting and display technologies like LEDs.

DenBaars said that Craford's estimate of energy savings may be a slight overstatement, "but it's on that scale."

"Twenty-two percent of [U.S.] electrical energy consumption goes into lighting, and we're talking about taking the efficiency up several factors here and taking that number down to like 3 or 4 percent," he said.

By that calculation, he said, energy-efficient lighting could save the U.S. the equivalent of the power produced annually by 133 coal-fired power plants.

Technology Advances

LEDs are tiny devices made of semiconductors—solid materials such as silicon that have varying abilities to conduct electricity.